Electronic postage meters are well known. Such devices operate under microcomputer control to perform printing and accounting operations associated with the printing of a postal indicia on an envelope. Such accounting is based typically on funds which are stored as register values in the memory of the meter and decreased as postage is expended in accordance with the postal value printed by the meter. Other accounting systems are known such as the so-called current account meters in which the register value simply increases in accordance with the expending of postal value and the expended value is calculated on the difference in register reading from one time to the next.
Conventionally, in the United States, and in other countries as well, the Postal authorities who control the meter placements have required that a separate log or journal be maintained on a daily basis so as to provide a double check on the expending of funds as accounted for by the meter and to provide a basis for reconciliation of funds in the event of malfunction of the meter and also to aid in control of any attempts to defraud the Post Office with respect to expenditures actually made.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,931,943 describes a meter which includes apparatus for collecting this accounting information and printing it at least every two months using an accompanying journal printer. While this apparatus may work well with the previously known stand-alone meters where the meter and log may be kept together, in the environment of a plurality of mail processing installations adapted to receive a plurality of meters, the difficulty in reconciling accounts using the meter information alone becomes almost impossible, much less the automation of such providing of a Meter Activity Log. There is no teaching in this patent of a solution to the problem of automatic collection of data necessary for reconciliation of accounts in situations or installations where a plurality of meters can be transported and used in various systems by different operators.